The World Wide Web comprises many different types of websites, including sites that offer products for purchase, sites that provide entertainment, and sites that provide information. Among the latter are websites that provide general information, such as encyclopedic websites, and those that provide user-specific information, such as the prices of stocks the user is interested in, or the weather at the user's location. Generally, such user-specific information is tailored to the user through a setup process by which the user specifies the information that they are interested in.
Websites that provide the user with information that is desirable to the user are likely to be more often visited by the user. The number of times that a user visits a website, multiplied by the number of users of the website, is commonly referred to as the “traffic” for a website. The ability of a website to sell advertising space, and thereby generate income, is dependent on a number of factors, but at least one significant factor is the amount of traffic that the website receives. Thus, high traffic websites tend to generate an increased amount of advertising income.
However, depending on the type of information being provided by the website, and the design of the website itself, the setup process for any given user can be tedious and time-consuming. As a result, some visitors to the website will not undertake the setup process, and not become signed-up users of the website, thereby making it more difficult for the website to determine what information would be useful to them.
One method for enticing visitors to complete the setup process is to provide them with a demonstration of the capabilities of the website. Generally, such a demonstration takes the form of default values that are used in the absence of user-specified values. For example, a website seeking to demonstrate the delivery of financial data can provide, as defaults, the data for common financial indices. If the visitor believes that the website will be useful to them in the future, they may be more likely to undertake the setup process, provide the website with the information that they would like to see presented to them in the future, and thereby become a signed-up user of the website.